Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  “I was trying to protect you. But I shouldn’t have done that. If I hadn’t done it, you wouldn’t have married Briggs and been so unhappy all these years.”

  “Hush,” Lola said.

  “I just wanted you to be happy.”

  “I know,” Lola said. “Everyone wants me to be happy.”

  There was nothing else Mel could say. She sat back with her hands dropped carelessly in her lap. Lola’s features, small and delicate, maintained their passive expression. The only sign of any inner agitation was a slight trembling of her chin.

  She cleared her throat and leaned over, stretching her hands out across the table to Mel. “I forgive you,” she said. “I know you did it with the best of intentions.” She held on to Mel, then let her go, leaning back in her chair. “Besides, my mother would have hunted us down and had the marriage annulled, and I would’ve wound up married to Briggs anyway.”

  “But I didn’t have to make it easy for them. I was your friend.”

  “You’re still my friend,” Lola said.

  A sudden gust of wind blew the candle out. The sea was dark and still.

  Mel said, “You know, I used to dream of rescuing you from that place your mother took you. That hospital. I used to dream of crashing in there like Sylvester Stallone and taking you out.”

  “Which is pretty funny,” Sara said, “considering that you helped put her there.”

  “Don’t,” Lola said. “None of that matters anymore. This is all I want, the four of us right here, right now.”

  Annie leaned to relight the candle. There was a smell of rain in the air, subtle yet persistent, and she lifted her nose and sniffed. Sara came back to the circle and sat down. Mel smoothed her hair off her face and stared up at the bright moon. After a while, she said sleepily, “Can you believe the way this night’s turned out?”

  “I feel like I’m in therapy.”

  “You are in therapy.”

  “We’re all in therapy.”

  “Here’s to friendship,” Annie said, lifting her glass and thinking how peaceful it all felt, the slumbering sea, the spreading moonlight. A bank of translucent clouds scuttled across the moon. It was impossible to believe in the randomness of life when looking at a sky like that.

  “To friendship,” they all said in unison, lifting their glasses.

  The tension, which had been steadily growing between them all week, was gone. The elephant had tiptoed out on its huge feet. Annie drained her glass and set it down on the table. She felt better than she had in years, filled with an airy lightness of spirit. What was it Lola had said? Thaumaturgy. The working of miracles.

  Mel leaned back expansively and opened her arms to the night sky. “See, Lola, you’re the only one with nothing to confess. You’re the only one who’s never done anything rotten enough to ask for forgiveness.”

  Lola put her head back and laughed, a bright swelling laugh that made the others smile to hear it.

  “Why are you laughing?” Mel asked.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “If only it were that easy,” Lola said.

  Mel slept fitfully. She dreamed of a great cat resting on her chest and purring in her ear and she awoke to a distant puttering sound growing fainter, like the hum of an air conditioner or the slight clatter of bilge pumps. She looked at the clock. It was one-thirty The room was shuttered, and dark and cold as a tomb. The bed was vast and covered in down. Mel quickly fell back to sleep and awoke later to a loud pounding on the door.

  Captain Mike was standing in the dimly lit passageway. His face looked pale and worried. “I’m sorry to wake you,” he said, “but there’s another storm moving in. I think we should head back to the marina early.” He looked past her. “Mrs. Furman?” he said. Mel turned around. The bed was empty. She went into the bathroom to check but that was empty, too. “She’s not here,” she said, still groggy with sleep, stepping into the hallway.

  Sara’s cabin door swung open. “Who’s not here?” she asked, yawning.

  “Where’s Lola?”

  Sara blinked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought she was with you.”

  Annie stood behind Sara, wrapping her robe tightly around her.

  “Have you seen Lola?” Mel asked her.

  Annie shook her head no. Captain Mike swore and pushed past Mel, heading for the stairs to the deck. They could hear him pounding up the stairs, running now. The wind had picked up, and the boat was shifting heavily in the waves. The women made their way up to the deck. All the lights were on in the salon and galley as they passed through and went out onto the aft deck. Captain Mike was leaning over the deck rail, calling frantically for Lola. They all began to call, leaning over the rail to peer into the dark rolling water. A few minutes later, Captain Mike ran up the stairs to the bridge, and they could hear him shouting into the radio.

  Mel climbed the steps to the flybridge. The dinghy sat in its cradle, its seats glistening wetly in the moonlight. The instrument dial glowed dimly at the other end of the bridge. Captain Mike turned on the floodlight and slowly swept the dark rolling water in front of them. He shouted for Lola, his voice edging gradually toward panic. April came up on the bridge and said, “She’s not in the engine room. She’s not below.” Mel turned and followed her back down to the aft deck.

  The sky was growing light to the east. The mainland was a dim shape, shrouded in fog. Mel leaned over the railing, staring down into the pitching waves, fighting a rising sense of panic. She gripped the rail and shouted Lola’s name.

  It was then that she noticed Lola’s eyeglasses, lying forlornly on the deck at her feet.

  Chapter 39

  ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

  he memorial service was to be held at the Episcopal church in Birmingham where Lola had been christened as a baby. Mel made arrangements to fly into Nashville and then drive down to Birmingham with Annie and Mitchell.

  It was a beautiful day, warm and ripe with the promise of summer. The trees were green and leafy, and all along the roadside wildflowers bloomed. Mel had forgotten how pretty Tennessee was in late spring. She sat in the backseat watching the distant rim of blue hills that rose to the east, listening to Annie speculate endlessly about Lola’s death.

  “She may have gone up on the deck to get something and accidentally knocked her glasses off,” Annie said over her shoulder to Mel, for maybe the fiftieth time. “You know how Lola was. And she was legally blind. Maybe she leaned down to pick up the glasses, lost her balance, and fell overboard.” Mitchell patted Annie reassuringly on the shoulder, like the good husband that he was.

  Mel stared out the window at the rolling landscape, trying not to imagine Lola, alone and nearly blind, stooping to pick up her glasses before pitching forward into the dark ocean. But that image was still preferable to the other one, that of Lola throwing herself purposefully over the railing. So far Mel was the only one to have imagined this scenario, at least to her knowledge. Annie had never mentioned it, nor had Sara in any of their late-evening conversations.

  Outside the window the sunlight glinted off the limestone cliffs rising on either side of the expressway. Mel could see the holes the highway engineers had drilled to place the dynamite. In the front seat, Annie was still chattering away about someone named Agnes Grace, a child she’d met at some church orphanage. Annie’s face was animated, and despite her obvious grief over Lola, she seemed happy. Mel was sure if she leaned over the seat she’d find Annie and Mitchell holding hands like teenagers.

  She leaned her face on her palm and thought about her new novel, the one she’d begun to think about writing, the one she’d been incubating in her subconscious like a great, speckled egg. She was through with Flynn Mendez, at least for a while. She needed to try something else. She needed to recapture the excitement she’d felt that night in the darkened auditorium listening to Pat Conroy, that moment of epiphany when she’d felt like her whole life lay before her, and anything was possible if only she had the courage to try. Her agent to
ld her it would be career suicide, but somehow it didn’t feel that way. What was it the Native Americans said? If you come to the edge of a tall cliff, jump. Maybe that’s what she needed to do to get her life back on track. To jump.

  “What are you working on these days?” Annie asked politely.

  Lola’s body had never been found. Two pink slippers had washed up on Lea Island but that was all.

  “Something new but nothing I’m willing to talk about yet.”

  Mel tried not to think about Lola, or the memorial service. She stared out the window at the green rolling landscape. It was hard to think about death on a day like this. As they came through the ridge cut, the glass towers of Nashville rose before her. She’d always liked Nashville, an artistic city with a small-town feel. Not like Howard’s Mill, of course. Nothing like Howard’s Mill. She sighed, thinking about her girlhood home.

  “How’s your daddy?” Annie asked, craning her head so she could see Mel.

  “He’s fine.” He wasn’t, of course. He was a mess. Leland was nearly blind, and he walked now with a walker. The long-suffering Mercedes had finally had enough and she’d left, and Mel had had to hire a long line of home-care nurses to come in and check on him. She could look down the road and see Leland’s inevitable move to a nursing home. The last time she spoke to him, she’d tried to break it to him.

  “Daddy, you can’t stay by yourself.”

  Leland said, “Did you just call me Daddy?”

  “Oh, my God, Leland, focus.”

  “Promise me you won’t put me out to pasture,” he said. “Promise me you won’t put me in one of those old-folks’ homes where the diaper-wetting bastards sit around waiting to die.”

  “They’re not all like that. Some of them are nice.”

  It gave her a grim measure of satisfaction to know that she had the power to put him someplace he didn’t want to go. Not that she would, of course, at least not anytime soon.

  Outside the window, Nashville rose like the city of Oz. Mel rested her cheek against the glass and stared at the wide blue sky, wondering what death must feel like. She had cried herself empty but there were still moments when grief overcame her, rising up when she least expected it. When it became too much to bear, she called Sara.

  She had spoken to J.T. several times since Lola’s death, his voice cool and distant while he waited for Sara to pick up the phone. She didn’t know if it was grief or anger that made him sound so detached but she’d dreamed of him afterward. And now this afternoon she would see him again for the first time in nine years.

  She hoped he was bald and fat.

  Annie rattled on about Agnes Grace, trying to fill the long silences. Mel had been morose and distant since they picked her up at the airport; she seemed to be taking Lola’s death hard. They all were, really. It was a tragic event, the kind of thing they would never really get over.

  Mitchell patted Annie reassuringly on the shoulder, and she gave him a bright little smile. He dropped his hand and reached over and took hers, and they drove for awhile like this, hand in hand, like a courting couple.

  Something had happened to Annie out there on the island. Some shift in perception, an awareness dawning like a light on the horizon. Something potent and miraculous. She had gone out there the old Anne Louise Stites but she had returned a new woman. She had shed her skin like a snake, and that was why, despite Lola’s death, despite the sadness of the occasion, she could still feel a deep and overwhelming sense of joy on this bright, sunlit day.

  She squeezed his hand and Mitchell looked at her and grinned. He had been very sweet throughout this whole ordeal, flying down to be with her during the inquest, calling and making excuses as to why she couldn’t be at various committee meetings, making sure no one bothered her while she was grieving. She had been a woman on a mission when she got back from North Carolina. She had wasted no time, driving out to the Baptist Home for Children to see Agnes Grace. She’d taken her a bag of seashells, a T-shirt that read BEACH BUNNY, and a book on turtles she’d picked up at the Whale Head Island Turtle Conservancy. Agnes Grace seemed happy to see her.

  “Girl, where you been?” she asked, eagerly grabbing the gifts Annie had brought. “I thought you’d run off and left me.”

  “Now Agnes Grace, you know I told you I was meeting some friends for a week in North Carolina.”

  “Yeah. I forgot.” She picked carefully through the shells. “How was it? Being with your friends, I mean.”

  “It was good.” Annie smiled sadly and gently stroked the child’s hair off her face. “It was really good.” Agnes Grace had seen enough of death and hardship in her short life and Annie was determined not to burden her with more.

  The next day she picked Agnes Grace up and took her to meet Mitchell. He was out by the pool, cleaning laurel leaves out of the water with a strainer, and Agnes Grace went right up to him and said, “Hey, what you doing?” Annie had told Mitchell about the child, of course, she had warned him, but Mitchell and Agnes Grace got on famously. They cleaned out the pool and then took a ride on the motorized Mule to see the farm and check out Alan Jackson’s horses. When they got back, Agnes Grace was all excited.

  “Mitchell says he’ll get me a pony,” she said, hopping from foot to foot. “For me to ride anytime I want.”

  Annie raised one eyebrow and looked at Mitchell, and he flushed and said, “Well, now honey, we got all that acreage just going to waste. And Agnes Grace can come out and ride and feed it and help muck out the barn.”

  “I can milk the goats, too!” Agnes Grace said, still hopping.

  Annie said, “Goats?”

  Mitchell took his cowboy hat off and wiped his brow with one arm. “Taking care of animals teaches a child responsibility. You know that, honey.”

  “That’s right, taking care of animals teaches a child responsibility!” Agnes Grace shouted. Her face was red and streaked with sweat and dirt, and she looked happy, happier than Annie had ever seen her look.

  “Well, I know that, but I think we might need to talk to the neighbors before we start buying goats.”

  Later that night, Annie lay in bed beside Mitchell and told him what she wanted, what she’d wanted from the very first time she met Agnes Grace, only she didn’t know it then.

  “Adoption’s a pretty big decision,” Mitchell said softly. “Even if her mama agrees to it, there’s still the responsibility of raising a child at our age.”

  “Goodness, Mitchell, you make us sound like we’re old. We’re only in our mid-forties. And forty is the new thirty, in case you didn’t know.”

  “Oh, is that right?” He leaned over and tickled her until she made him stop.

  “We’ll go slow,” Annie said. “We’ll introduce her to the boys and then we’ll make a family decision, because once we invite her in, she’s family. She’ll be our little girl.”

  Mitchell put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “Well,” he said. “She’s a fine girl.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  Mitchell grinned, his teeth gleaming in the darkness. “And I can’t wait to see how she shakes things up at that stuck-up private school you sent the boys to.”

  Annie giggled, thinking about that. Q-Tip was pretty tame compared to what future mothers would probably call her.

  Outside her window, the green hills of Tennessee glided past. Annie hummed a little tune under her breath. She could never be a good mother to her lost children, but she could be a good mother to Agnes Grace. That would have to be enough.

  “What time’s the service?” Mel asked from the backseat.

  “Two-thirty” Annie forced herself to stop thinking about the happy future and concentrate on the mournful present. Poor Lola. Poor Lola and Lonnie. To have known, and lost, the love of a good man seemed tragic. It wasn’t so much the life Lola had lost as much as it was the life she’d never lived that seemed so unbearably sad to Annie.

  The night before the memorial service, Sara, Tom, and Nicky were sprawled on T
om and Sara’s queen-size bed watching the latest Lego movie. Adam was down on the floor, building a Lego fortress.

  “Okay, watch this,” Tom said. Sara was lying on her side, spooned up against him. She looked up at him and smiled, putting her hand on his cheek. He hadn’t shaved in days; the semester had ended this week, and his face was rough. She ran her fingers lightly over the stubble and he kissed them and said, “Look,” pointing at the TV screen.

  “Where’s Adam?” Nicky said. “I don’t see him.” She was sprawled at the end of the bed on her stomach, her thin legs waving back and forth like windshield wipers. A plate of half-eaten pizza sat on the bed beside her. Caught by their measured movement, Sara stared at Nicky’s legs. Had they always been that thin?

  On the TV screen, a Lego tyrannosaurus, moved by two hands, attacked a city of Legos. “Roar,” someone said in the background. Adam looked up. He stood, then sat on the edge of the bed. “That’s me,” he said, watching the screen. “The sound guy is me.” They watched it until the end and then everyone clapped. Adam smiled and went back to playing with his Legos on the floor. Nicky folded her bird legs under her and rolled off the bed. “I’ll be right back,” she said, picking up the pizza plate.

  “Are you going to the kitchen?” Sara tried not to stare at her arms and legs but she couldn’t help herself. They were painfully thin; the child looked like she would blow away in a strong gust of wind.

  Nicky put her hand on her hip and rolled her eyes. She sighed dramatically. “What do you want?” she asked.

  “A glass of water.”

  “I’ll have a beer,” Tom said.

  Nicky smiled at him. She didn’t mind getting him a beer nearly as much as she minded getting her mother a glass of water. They heard her tripping down the hall and then her feet pattering down the back stairway to the kitchen.

  “Follow her,” Sara said, “and see if she goes into the bathroom.”

  “Stop it,” Tom said. He leaned over and tapped Adam on the top of the head. “Hey, buddy, did you put together that space cruiser I got you?”